Harry P.

Great looking model, great looking photos. What's not to like?

What are you drawing on? Vellum? Mylar? Or paper? Looks like you're getting a real nice, clean line, must be coated paper if not vellum or Mylar.

I think I read somewhere once that Chrysler paid WB $10,000 for the rights to the "Road Runner" name and the cartoon character image. That was a steal! I'll bet there were plenty of RR's sold back in the day just because of the cool name and logo!

One thing you have to remember is, I don't Photoshop the car! The only time I'll alter the photo is if the background or the surface the car is on would give things away (like a model on a real driveway, for instance... the scale of the car would be obvious). But other than that, I don't touch the car. If I did, that wouldn't be any fun... I could fool all of you every single time!

Drill a hole in the wheel, and glue in a short piece of wire. Paint it flat black or silver. Can't get much simpler than that.

Any model is admitted... plastic, diecast, scratchbuilt, carved from a block of soap... doesn't matter. A model is a model, no matter what it's made of.

I can't argue with your logic!

Another problem. There are two pieces of metal trim for each side window, the "glass" has a rabbeted edge that the window frame is supposed to fit over. Obviously the left and right hand sides of glass and frame are mirror images... the "finished" side of the frame is supposed to be on the outside. The problem? I didn't get a matching left/right set. I got 2 left sides!

Here's what I'm talking about. It actually looks worse in real life, the photo doesn't really show how bad the misalignment is. I'll figure it out...

I have the Paul Koo CD. But that doesn't help change the shape of the doors! The problem is that the doors (or the body?) are warped somehow. The doors fit into the opening as far as filling the opening, but they don't line up along the surface of the body. If the hinges are installed into the body like they're supposed to fit, and the doors are lined up with the body along their rear edge, the upper front corner sticks out away from the body. And if I line up the front edge of the doors with the body, the lower rear door corner sticks out. I can't heat the door skins and reshape them to fit the body because then the inner panels wouldn't fit right (they fit correctly to the door skins as is). Like I said before, I think I'll just try and split the difference between the lower back and upper front corners when I glue the hinges to the doors and body. The right side door is worse than the left, the left one is actually not horrible. I think that the problem is that the cowl area of the body is warped. In fact I'm pretty sure the body is warped, because it was WAY out of whack before I mounted it to the chassis. Years of sitting in the box and probably having pressure on it from some of the other parts trees warped the body. Screwing it down pulled things into place a little, but there's still some warp left in the cowl area, the whole thing slants left... which explains why the right door "sticks out" at the front. Maybe I can use little wedges of plastic between the cowl and the firewall on the right side of the body to try and make the body and the door line up better. It'll never be perfect, but maybe I can make it look at least halfway decent. Then there are the door latches. The pieces are tiny, the tolerances are sloppy, and I'd be willing to bet that no matter how carefully I build them, after a few times they break or jam or otherwise stop working. I can see it already... Man, I've having fun now!!!

How about it? Real or model? The answer: REAL!

It is driving me bonkers. I can deal with misaligned engine and chassis parts... after all, you don't really see that once the model is done. But the painfully obvious misaligned doors? There's no way to hide that. What kills me is that there's no way to foresee this. You can't line up the doors to the body until the body is attached to the chassis... because the final shape and angles of the door openings aren't "final" until the body is screwed down to all the mounting points and all the flex and twist of the body is finalized. At that point, there's really no way to align the doors into the opening. I can't change the door openings, I can't change the doors, and I can't change the hinge locations. I think I'll try scrapbooking!

Man, what a frustrating day! I mounted the body to the chassis, now I'm trying to hang the doors. Well, wouldn't you know, the doors don't fit. And I mean, it's not even close! If I line up the door to the body at the rear of the door, the front is way off, and if I line up the front of the door to the body, the rear is totally out of whack. There's no way to fix this now. The body is attached at six points, there's no way to alter that. The door openings are what they are, and the doors are what they are... and the doors don't fit! I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Maybe the best bet is to split the difference, and have the doors misaligned a little in front and a little in back... but no matter how I try to fake it, the doors flat out don't fit, and it looks pretty bad. Sigh...

Looks good. Is this pen and ink?

Is it for sale?

It's painted, and in real life it's not that shiny. I think the camera flash makes it look shinier than it really is. In reality it's sort of between flat black and semi-gloss.

Building a Pocher takes a whole lotta effort... and time... and patience. They're not really hard to build... frustrating would be a better word, because so many parts just don't fit right, and the fit of one part affects the fit of other parts down the line. And many times, you have no way of knowing how one part will affect the fit of another part until you get to the point where you're trying to attach that "other" part... and of course by then it's too late. So you either have to disassemble a ton of stuff and go back and fix the first part... or modify the last part to fit, and hope that modifying that part won't cause even more problems down the road. And so on... Like Rick said, there are aftermarket instructional CDs available, and I use them, but I've found that while they do warn you about a lot of problem areas you might otherwise never see coming, they also contain some mistakes. Also... if you seriously want to try building a Pocher, keep in mind that some kits are way harder to build than others. The easiest one (and usually the cheapest one on ebay) is the 1907 Fiat race car. No doors, no windows, no fenders, etc. Of course, you'd have to have an interest in that sort of car, but if you do, and you want to try a Pocher, that one is definitely the one to start with. I guarantee you, you'll love the experience... and when you're done you'll have a real showpiece.

Ok... here's something I've never done before: build a cloth convertible top! The kit supplies pre-cut cloth pieces for the top–a center section, two side pieces and a lining. The kit cloth is tan, I wanted a white top... so off to Hobby Lobby to get some off-white muslin. I used the kit cloth pieces as templates to cut my new top pieces. The borders of each piece were "hemmed" by folding them back 5mm and gluing the flaps down on the inside of the pieces. Then the three main top pieces were sewn together by hand! And here I thought building a Pocher wheel was tedious! It took me a couple of hours to fold and glue all the "hems" and another several hours to do the sewing (since I don't know how to sew!!!). I didn't use the kit rear window, it's way too thick... so I cut a piece of clear acetate for the window and sewed it in place into the opening I cut. The reason I'm already working on the top this early in the game is because it attaches to the body from underneath, with screws, along the rear flange. You have to attach the top to the body before you mount the body to the chassis... and since I'm pretty much at the point where the body is going on the chassis, I had to build (and install) the top first. One of the biggest problems with the top is that the center section has parallel sides, but in order for the top to look good and not have a bunch of slack and wrinkles in it, the center section has to taper in width as it goes towards the back. The width of the center section has to be about 40mm narrower at the rear than at the front. A lot of trial and error goes into fitting the top sections, and even now I'm not sure how tight the top will stretch over the three hoops that make up the framework of the top. I might have to make my own hoops out of brass strip, depending on how well (or how poorly) the top fits. We'll see...

A bit O.T. but when I was a kid somebody on our block had one! It was red with a white interior, and it would be parked out on the street with all the other "regular" cars. I guess the owner commuted to work in it M-F and took it out to the lake on the weekend?

You forgot to mention the elephant...

I know, it's not really funny...

Ah geez... you can't swing a dead cat around here and not hit a few Citroen rat rods... Kidding, C-mos... that's pretty cool (and unusual, for sure!)

Looks to me like the rivets are a lot smaller and less visible on the real thing. I guess taking those down to 1/8 scale would have made them disappear!

From the website: "1/8 1924 Hispano Suiza "Tulipwood" - a fully scratchbuilt 24" long all metal replica. Handcrafted from over 6800 components in an edition of 25 units. Functional......Expensive, inquire." An "all metal" replica of a wooden-bodied car? Well, that's what they say! Here's a real one: